Good Vibrations Magazine

Part 1
Forniphilia: A Definition

According to The House of Gord, forniphilia is “the art of human furniture.” A forniphiliac, therefore, is a person, most often a man, who fetishes another person, most often a woman, who has been modified or manipulated to appear to be a home furnishing. Take, for example, the man who, as a form of foreplay, requests that his wife stand in a corner of their home with a lamp shade on her head; he is a forniphiliac. Although, of course, as with any fetishistic sex act, the eroticized power dynamics at play between the two are far more complex. At Gord, which can best be described as ground zero for forniphiles, variations on this theme include the three-woman chandelier, the human footstool and the person-as-desk-chair.

From one vantage point, forniphilia could be seen as a forward-thinking fetish for the new millennium. Combining the design-obsessed “lifestyle porn” of, say, Wallpaper magazine with the classic bindings and stiff posturings of classic S/M, forniphilia’s chic kinky fashionings of the human form are simply the next step in style. From another vantage point, forniphilia could be seen as just one more male fantasy of female submission to male dominance, geared toward the male orgasm. Indeed, at the House of Gord, women are described as “dangerous,” and forniphilia is offered up as the perfect solution to gender strife. “Try sitting on a human female chair, with a human female table, and a human female foot stool,” gushes Jeff Gord, “and you really stop caring about the battle of the sexes.”

Apparently, Gord’s wife and partner, Lady Serena, doesn’t mind becoming furniture. “I’m often completely immobilized into intense bondage creations built by my husband, using a variety of materials such as steel, copper, wood, fiberglass and various chemical compounds. That’s our idea of fun!” she crows. So, who are we, those who might not be open-minded enough to render ourselves into an armchair for the ones we love, to judge those who are? Of their forniphilia-filled experiences together, explains Serena, “It allows us to speak the unspeakable to one another — the truth about what gets us off.”

Part 2
Forniphilia: A Fiction

She was standing in the corner. She had a lamp shade on her head. The lamp shade was making her head sweat. I am a lamp, she told herself. She was standing in the corner with her arms straight down at her sides and a lamp shade on her head, waiting for her husband to come home. Her husband wanted her to be a lamp. Her husband was a good man. But he wanted his wife to be different pieces of furniture, depending on the day of the week. And that was hard. For her. It turned him on. She said out loud to herself, “I am a lamp.” She didn’t really want to be a lamp, though. She wanted to be a human being. That was the problem. A lamp, she told herself. I am a lamp. Who knew what she would become tomorrow? Maybe she would be an armchair. An armchair is better than a lamp, she thought. Then it occurred to her that being an armchair would probably require her to bend both of her legs all the way back over her head so that her butt would become the seat. And that would not be comfortable. At all. God only knew what would happen to her if her husband wanted to sit down on top of her at his desk to do some work that he had brought home from the office. Probably, she would break. A broken armchair. She heard her husband’s key turning in the lock of their front door. At this rate, she thought, I will end up as a bike rack. Day in and day out, she would ride around on the back of her husband’s car. In the wind. In the rain. In the snow. It would never end. The tall dark outline of her husband stepped into the room. I am a lamp, she told herself underneath the lamp shade in the corner. That was what her husband wanted. She turned herself on.

Part 3
Forniphilia: An Explanation

Maybe a year and a half ago, I came across forniphilia for the first time. I was working on a television show that focused on the subject of sex, and it was our duty to discover those erotic topics that hadn’t already been extensively covered in the media. I had covered porn stars, gang bangs, dominatrices and bukkake. Then I found forniphilia.

For me, there is something particularly intriguing about forniphilia. The best fetishistic practices, I’ve found, hold within them two contrary erotic impulses. With forniphilia, the fetishistic object has been rendered powerless through a literal and metaphorical ritual of total subjugation. At the same time, the resultant fetishized object takes on an undeniably dominant power of its own in its insistence that its eroticism be worshiped and revered.

And so the photo of the woman-as-lamp that I came across some time ago on The House of Gord has stayed with me. There is something about it that I can’t quite get out of my mind. There she stands, the lamp shade on her head, the bit in her mouth, the red straps across her body. Her light bulb is, of course, on. I want to know what it is she is thinking.

Does she like it? Is she happy? Is it hot under there? It is hard to tell. Perhaps it is the simultaneity of her vulnerability and her mysteriousness that captivates me. In the end, I do not put a lamp shade on my head and go stand naked in the corner, waiting for my boyfriend to come home. But, eventually, I expect, I will return to the picture of the woman-as-lamp, and I will sit and think to myself, “Now, what would that be like?”